Secretary Pete talks the talk, but will he walk the walk?
By Ed Perkins
In July, I was privileged to join a group of the country’s most prominent travel consumer advocates in an online meeting with new Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Our group asked for this meeting to press our case for action on several important consumer airline issues. Secretary Pete proved himself to be an attentive listener, and his remarks touched on all the important bases.
Clearly, he can talk the talk on these issues; now we wait to see if he will walk the walk and get something done. I’m cautiously optimistic.
We nominated different members of our group to focus on each of four key issues:
1. John Breyault, vice president of Public Policy, Telecommunications and Fraud for the National Consumers League, took on the overall task of emphasizing the DoT’s unique role as only source, at any level of government, for consumer protection against airline abuses. The Deregulation Act preempts all authority over airline matters to the federal government, so that consumers can’t turn to state or local officials to fix problems. To this end, Breyault called for increased consumer group access throughout the DoT’s policy-making processes.
2. Kurt Ebenhoch, executive director of Travel Fairness Now, took on the hot-button issue of refunds for tickets consumers had to cancel because of COVID-19 limitations and restrictions. Black-letter regulation requires airlines to make full refunds on even the most nonrefundable tickets when the airline cancels first, but consumers who cancel first get only what airline policies provide. When forced to cancel because of government edict or regulation, consumers should receive refunds. Airlines have a force majeure exemption from fulfilling their contracts; consumers need the same protection.
3. Bill McGee, aviation adviser, and Anna Laitin, director of Financial Fairness and Legislative Strategy for Consumer Reports, emphasized the need I’ve repeatedly stressed for a rule that airlines allow families to reserve seats together in advance without paying seat-reservation fees. Requiring that families pay extra to sit together is clearly unfair — to the kids, to the adults with the kids, to the hapless strangers who would otherwise be seated next to someone else’s unsupervised kid, and to the many who are delayed and inconvenienced by time-of-departure “musical chairs.”
4. Paul Hudson, president, FlyersRights.org, urged DoT to take action on two related fronts: a rule on minimum passenger seat size and a requirement that FAA run realistic emergency crash evacuation tests that accurately reflect current passenger size, age mix and behavior. We all know that passengers have been getting bigger and seats have been getting smaller: consumers need some sort of minimum standards for both health and safety reasons.
DoT response to two of the four points can quickly show whether the secretary and his staff mean business. Refunds and family seating are no-brainers: Airlines are abusing consumers, and DoT has authority to fix these abuses. Quick action will prove that Secretary Pete’s department is serious about consumer protection — and it will also offer his administration a quick and popular “win” with voters.
We recognize that the seat size issue is long-term: Although the standard six-across economy class seats in the A320 and B737 families are too narrow to accommodate many of today’s increasingly bulky travelers, those seats are already as wide as they can get, and we’ll be flying on those planes for several more decades. But even if DoT can’t make things better any time soon, it can make sure they don’t get worse.